Navigating Noise

Filter Labs
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Politics
  • Updated Weekly

Navigating Noise is a weekly interview show about how critical decisions get made when the data behind them breaks down. Hosts Jonathan Teubner, founder of AI intelligence company FilterLabs, and Erol Yayboke, former Pentagon deputy chief of staff, talk with analysts, operators, and decision-makers working in intelligence and information operations. Each episode asks one question: how do you know what's actually happening in places that are hard to see? Season 2 covers the data supply chain behind info ops, the analyst under pressure, and the future of the craft.

  1. 1d ago

    How to Fill an Information Vacuum Before Your Enemy Does with Kristian Ljungberg

    On February 4, 2025, ten people were murdered at a school in Örebro, the deadliest mass shooting in Sweden's history. Then came a silence that the internet filled for days. Kristian Ljungberg holds national responsibility for how the Swedish Police communicate on days like that, and his read on what went wrong is not what you'd expect from a serving official: the first error was a decision on an org chart. The agency treated a national trauma as a regional incident, which meant no national chain of command and nobody authorized to speak for the country while rumor took the field. Before the police, Kristian ran crisis communication at the Forsmark and Ringhals nuclear plants and in healthcare. Three industries, one problem: what you say in the first minutes when people are terrified and the facts aren't in. He co-wrote Sweden's 2026 national guideline on joint communication during hybrid incidents, which makes him one of the few people who has actually written down how a democracy should talk to its citizens while under attack. Jonathan Teubner sits down with him on the sidelines of the Riga StratCom Dialogue for a conversation about the trade-off at the center of the job: getting it right versus getting it out, and what happens to a country when the silence becomes the battlefield. In this episode: Why the "golden hour" of crisis communication is now, in his words, five minutesHow the Swedish Police published their first message on the 2017 Stockholm terror attack in three minutesThe one time Kristian deliberately made a story harder to understand, and sent reporters an 800-page Interpol protocolWhat actually happened inside the Örebro information vacuum, and the decision he calls a strategic mistakeWhy the police eventually released footage from inside the school, blood on the floor, and why the criticism stopped after they didHow he tells scared people getting it wrong apart from a deliberate influence operation, and why the response is nearly identicalWhat Sweden means by "vaccinating" a population against disinformation, and why he thinks a skeptical public is a healthy one Subscribe to Navigating Noise for new episodes on how the world's most critical decisions get made, and what happens when the information behind them breaks down. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. More on Filter Labs: filterlabs.ai

  2. Aug 11

    Why People Believe AI Videos Even When They Know They're Fake

    In May, Ukrainians woke up to an avalanche of posts about hundreds of thousands of migrants flooding into their country, exempt from the draft, replacing Ukrainians, even renaming their cities. Influencers made TikToks about it. Public broadcasters ran explainers debunking it. Within four days it was the number one topic in the country. None of it was true. Roman Osadchuk is Head of Threat Intelligence at LetsData, where he investigates information operations, and he has co-authored research on Russian influence campaigns with the Atlantic Council's DFRLab. He joins Jonathan in Riga to walk through what he actually sees in the data: leaked Russian internal documents with content quotas and performance dashboards, cloned news sites that check your IP address before letting you in, and a strategy that no longer bothers trying to make you believe anything in particular. In this episode: How a fabricated migration wave became Ukraine's top story in four daysWhy "does it feel true" has replaced "is it true," and what that does to a societyInside Russia's leaked playbook: 300,000 comments a month, quotas, dashboardsHow doppelganger sites steal the credibility of the Washington Post and Fox NewsWhy Russia's own doctrine has no word for "offensive," only "counter campaigns"What AI genuinely changed in influence operations, and what it still can't doThe one question Roman says protects you better than any media literacy course Subscribe to Navigating Noise for new episodes every week. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. More on Roman's work at LetsData: letsdata.ai

  3. Aug 4

    How to Tell What's Real Online in the Age of AI Bots | Tetiana Haiduchyk

    For 6 years, Tetiana Haiduchyk has run a controlled experiment most people never hear about. Her team goes onto the open market, pays a few hundred euros for fake social media engagement, and measures whether the world's biggest platforms can detect and remove it. Mostly, they can't. Tetiana is Head of Analytics at Trementum, the small Kyiv data-science firm that serves as the analytical engine behind NATO StratCom's flagship "Social Media Manipulation for Sale" experiments. This year's run generated more than 100,000 interactions from over 30,000 inauthentic accounts across seven platforms, for about €252. She does this work from inside Ukraine, where the information operations she studies target the country she lives in. That makes her the rare guest who is the show's protagonist made real: the analyst under pressure, testing a contaminated information environment, in a country at war. This conversation goes inside that job. How the market for inauthentic engagement actually works, why the bots stopped shouting and started blending into real conversations, and why a trained human's judgment is the filter that still holds up. Here are the biggest highlights: How the experiment buys engagement from commercial vendors, and why the payments run through cryptoWhy "spotting the bot" is over now that they comment like real peopleWhich platform removed 82% of the fake accounts, and which removed almost noneWhat following the crypto revealed about who runs the market for inauthentic engagementWhy speed favors adversaries who ignore their own rules, and what open societies can do about itHow she taught her own mother to check a source before trusting itWhat it takes to "feel alive" under constant threat Subscribe to Navigating Noise for the real story behind information warfare. Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

  4. Jul 28

    Why the US Keeps Losing the Wars It Spends the Most to Win | Dr. Joshua “Bugsy” Segal

    For ten years, Dr. Joshua "Bugsy" Segal's job was certainty. As a US arms-control negotiator and on-site weapons inspector (the Chemical Weapons Convention, UNSCOM in Iraq), he built the machinery that proves whether a country is lying about its weapons. Then, one month after 9/11, he walked out of the Pentagon, put on a Navy uniform, and spent two decades in the one domain with no inspectors, no treaty, and no way to verify anything: the information environment. In this episode of Navigating Noise, Segal tells hosts Jonathan Teubner and Erol why America is losing the information war, and it isn't for lack of money or tools. It's that the US never built a narrative, never defined its objectives, and therefore has no way to measure whether any of it works. He backs it up with a four-star's private grade of the US effort against China ("abysmal"), a working theory of when Americans lost their herd immunity to Russian disinformation, and a blunt read on why Ukraine, fighting for its life, out-adapts the most expensive military on earth. This is a rare conversation with someone senior enough to say what analysts and info-ops practitioners think every day but rarely hear out loud. In this episode: Why a weapons inspector says you can verify a centrifuge but you can't inspect a narrativeThe four-star official who privately graded America "abysmal" against ChinaHow Russia "poured gasoline on both sides" of America's political divideWhy strategic communication is "90% deeds, 10% words" and the smoke plume that proved itWhat Ukraine's cheap, fast innovation exposes about US spendingThe single word Segal would put on a billboard for billions to see Follow Navigating Noise so you never miss an episode. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  5. Jul 21

    NATO's StratCom Director Breaks Down the AI Information War | Jay Janzen

    In 2024, Jay Janzen told this show weaponized AI content was "minutes away." Two years later he's back with a blunt update: "We're definitely there." And the adversaries deploying it have no limits. Janzen is NATO's Strategic Communications Director and a former Canadian Brigadier-General, and he sits in the two-star meetings where military strategy and messaging now fuse. Recorded in Riga with Erol, this conversation gets into how NATO runs an information war without abandoning its values, why the alliance now treats deterrence as something that happens inside an adversary's head, and why the West's obsession with escalation is exactly the trap Russia wants us in. What you'll hear: Inside NATO's "shark tank" in Rennes, where 100 companies pitched agentic AI for cognitive operationsWhy Janzen rejects fighting disinformation with disinformation, even with one arm tied behind our backThe three spaces where NATO denies Russia advantage so "the math never adds up"How the comms team was asked to shape Steadfast Deterrence 2027 three years in advanceThe Nazi propaganda myth Janzen believed for 30 years, and what it taught him about bias in AIWhat "good data" means when garbage in means garbage out at machine speedThe one message he'd put on a billboard for billions to see Follow Navigating Noise so you never miss an episode. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about Filter Labs at filterlabs.ai

  6. Jul 14

    Introducing Filter Labs’ New CEO: Why We Made the Transition and What’s Next

    On July 1, 2026, Jonathan Teubner walked out of the CEO seat at Filter Labs and Erol Yayboke sat down in it. This conversation was recorded that same day. Jonathan decided years ago he wouldn't be the lifetime CEO. The founder instincts that keep an early company alive — high risk tolerance, selling a product that doesn't exist yet, chasing every opportunity — become a liability at scale, and he wanted out of the seat before that turned existential. A recruiter told him he couldn't hire his way out of it. So he watched his successor grow into the job instead, without telling him it was a test. Erol lays out what he's keeping (the nerdiness, the flatness, the allergy to meetings) and what changes as Filter Labs becomes a Washington company selling into defense, intelligence, finance, and marketing. Then the conversation turns to the reason the company exists: Russia's move against Telegram just made a generation of single-source monitoring tools useless, and a decade of answering data quality problems with data volume is catching up with everyone. Highlights: Why Jonathan started planning his exit two years before it happenedThe exact moment a founder's risk appetite becomes a liabilityHow Erol was tested for the CEO role without knowing itLife in the seat: five years without a single day fully offWhat the Telegram shutdown reveals about single-source intelligence toolsWhy "more data" stopped being the answer, and what good data looks like insteadThe Harvard Square DNA Filter Labs keeps as it becomes a DC company Subscribe to Navigating Noise for conversations on information, influence, and the data underneath both. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about Filter Labs: filterlabs.ai

  7. Jul 7

    How Iran Won the Internet with Memes While Losing the War with Blaise Misztal

    America won the war against Iran on the ground and lost it on the screen. Iran's axis of resistance has collapsed, its proxies are spent, its nuclear program is set back, yet Tehran got the Western internet to laugh along with an AI-generated Lego video that turned its mullahs into cuddly action figures and made American leadership look ineffectual. Tens of millions watched. We called it a meme. They ran it as a campaign. Blaise Misztal has spent two decades on Iran, from the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee to running policy at JINSA, where he built the case for a regime-collapse strategy. In this conversation he argues that the United States keeps fighting the wrong front. The most consequential battle isn't centrifuges, it's narrative, and a democracy built for four-year cycles is badly equipped to fight an adversary that has been at war with it for 47 years. He and co-host Jonathan Teubner get into why the data we use to read Iran is a proxy that keeps failing us, why "they survived, so they won" is a dangerous misread, and why America's own movies and music may be doing Tehran's work for it. What you'll hear: Why an AI-generated Lego video beat the most expensive intelligence apparatus in historyHow Iran fights a 47-year war while the U.S. resets every four yearsWhy Blaise moved from "manage Iran" to "collapse the regime"What the analyst's view of Iran's black-box economy actually looks likeWhy "surviving means winning" is propaganda, not analysisHow America's self-doubt became Tehran's easiest weapon to exploitThe closing case that the U.S. has exported freedom and hope, and how it forgot to say so Subscribe to Navigating Noise on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for conversations on how the world's most critical decisions get made, and what happens when the data behind them breaks down.

  8. Jun 23

    Why War With China Is NOT Inevitable with U.S.-China Relations Expert Ali Wyne

    When Trump called a meeting with Xi Jinping "the G-2," he may have admitted something Washington has spent years avoiding: China is no longer a rising challenger. It's a near-peer. Foreign-policy analyst Ali Wyne returns to Navigating Noise to unpack how that admission happened almost by accident, and what it means for the most consequential relationship of the century. Wyne, who works on U.S.–China at the International Crisis Group, makes a counterintuitive case: the goal between Washington and Beijing was never trust, and it shouldn't be. It should be empathy: a cold, dispassionate effort to understand an adversary you may never agree with. Along the way he and Jonathan Teubner dig into why young Americans are "China-maxing," why a generation of students has vanished from each other's countries, and why the popular story about China's all-seeing internet is mostly a bluff. In this episode: Why Trump's "G-2" comment was an accidental concession, not a strategyThe difference between empathy and sympathy, and why it decides foreign policyWhy genuine U.S.–China trust would actually be a red flag "China-maxing" and the sadness driving young Americans toward BeijingHow student exchanges collapsed from ~15,000 to under 2,000What the world gets wrong about dissent and censorship inside ChinaThe college student's question that D.C. would dismiss and Wyne still can't answerSubscribe to Navigating Noise for more conversations on how the world's biggest decisions get made. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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About

Navigating Noise is a weekly interview show about how critical decisions get made when the data behind them breaks down. Hosts Jonathan Teubner, founder of AI intelligence company FilterLabs, and Erol Yayboke, former Pentagon deputy chief of staff, talk with analysts, operators, and decision-makers working in intelligence and information operations. Each episode asks one question: how do you know what's actually happening in places that are hard to see? Season 2 covers the data supply chain behind info ops, the analyst under pressure, and the future of the craft.

Information

  • Creator
    Filter Labs
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Filter Labs
  • Show Website
    Navigating Noise